How China is and isnt fighting pollution and climate change Angel Hsu
When is seeing not believing?
A couple years ago, my friend
sent me this photo from Ürümqi,
which is the capital of Xinjiang
province in northwest China.
On this particular day,
she couldn’t believe her eyes.
Checking the quality of the air outside
using this app on her iPad,
the numbers were telling her
the air quality was good,
one on a scale of 500.
But when she looked outside,
she saw something much different.
Yes, those are buildings
in the background.
(Laughter)
But the data were simply
not telling the truth
of what people were seeing and breathing,
and it’s because they were
failing to measure PM2.5,
or fine particulate pollution.
When PM2.5 levels
went off the charts in 2012,
or “crazy bad,” as the US Embassy
once described it in a tweet,
Chinese denizens took to social media
and they started to question why it was
that they were seeing this disconnect
between official air quality statistics
and what they were seeing
and breathing for themselves.
Now, this questioning has led
to an environmental awakening
of sorts in China,
forcing China’s government
to tackle its pollution problems.
Now China has the opportunity
to become a global environmental leader.
But the picture
that I’ll paint for you today
is one that’s mixed.
There are some signs
that are very promising,
and there are other trends
that are more troubling
that warrant closer attention.
But now let’s go back
to the story at hand.
I started to witness the beginnings
of China’s green evolution
when I was a PhD student
conducting fieldwork in China in 2011.
I traveled all across the country
seeking answers to the question
that I often got myself
from the skeptical outsider:
What, you mean China is doing
something on the environment?
They have environmental policies?
What policies?
At that time, PM2.5 data
was considered too politically sensitive
and so the government
was keeping it secret,
but citizens were becoming aware
of its harmful human health effects,
and they were demanding
greater transparency
on the part of the government.
I actually started to see some of this
growing evolution and awareness myself
cropping up all over China.
Department stores, for example,
started to market these air purifiers
that could filter out harmful PM2.5.
Citizens were also adopting PM2.5
as the title of musical festivals.
(Laughter)
And then I went to a golf course
in Shenzhen, which is in southern China,
and you can see from this banner,
they’re advertising a retreat from PM2.5.
Golf sub-par, but don’t
breathe sub-par air.
And then Shanghai’s
Environmental Protection Bureau
decided to create a mascot
named after the air quality index
to better communicate
the air quality data to its people.
I call her AQI Girl,
and her expression and hair color changes
depending on the quality of air outside.
Five years later and she’s still
the mostly smiling face
of Shanghai’s air quality.
And then in 2015,
former CCTV reporter Chai Jing
created this documentary
called “Under the Dome.”
It would be likened
to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”
And much like Rachel Carson
brought to attention the fact
that pesticides were harming human health,
“Under the Dome” stamped
into the popular consciousness
that air pollution was leading
to one million premature deaths
every year in China alone.
This video garnered
more than a hundred million
views in a single weekend
before China’s government,
fearing that it might incite
some type of social unrest,
pulled it from the internet.
But the damage had already been done.
Public outcry over air pollution
galvanized China’s government,
perhaps in an act of self-preservation,
to think big and decisively
about how it could tackle
the root of its air pollution
and many of its other
environmental problems:
its energy system.
For you see, in China,
about two thirds of its
electricity comes from coal.
China has more coal-fired power plants
than any other country in the world,
about 40 percent of the global total,
and it’s because of this fact
that China’s government
has decided since 2014
to wage a war on coal,
shutting down small coal mines,
setting limits on coal consumption,
even canceling an Australia’s worth
of coal-fired power plants.
They’ve also been making
enormous investments
when it comes to clean
and renewable energy,
like hydropower, wind and solar,
and the pace and the scale
of this transformation
has been absolutely mind-blowing.
Let me give you a couple of statistics
to show you what I mean.
China leads the world
when it comes to hydropower,
with a third of total capacity.
There’s enough for every Chinese citizen
to power two homes in a single year
from hydropower alone.
You may have heard
of the Three Gorges Dam,
pictured here,
which is the largest
power station in the world,
and it’s powered by water.
In terms of wind power,
China has a third of the global capacity.
This makes it the number one
leader by far.
When we look at solar,
China’s also leading.
In fact, they crushed their 2020 target
of installing 105 gigawatts
of solar power.
This is after the government
already revised upwards
several times its solar energy target
between 2009 and 2015.
Last year, in seven months alone,
China was able to install
a whopping 35 gigawatts of solar power.
This is more than half
of what the US has combined in total
and China did this
in just seven months alone.
We can verify this remarkable growth
in solar power from space,
like the startup SpaceKnow
has done in this slide.
By 2020, China is on track to generate
Germany’s entire electricity consumption
from just wind and solar power alone.
It’s pretty darn remarkable.
And we see some evidence now
that China’s efforts on clean energy
is actually having an effect,
not just on air pollution reduction,
but also on global climate change,
where China has the world’s
largest carbon footprint.
If we look at some of the data,
we can see that China’s coal consumption
may have already reached a peak
as early as 2013.
This is a major reason
why China’s government announced
that actually they’ve already achieved
their 2020 carbon reduction pledge
ahead of schedule.
This reduction in coal consumption
is also directly driving
improvements in air quality
across the country,
as I’ve shown here in blue.
In most major Chinese cities,
air pollution has fallen
by as much as 30 percent.
And this reduction in air pollution
is actually leading people
to live longer lives in China,
on average two and a half years more
than they would have in 2013.
In yellow, we can see
the cities that have experienced
the greatest improvements in air quality.
But of course, as I mentioned
at the beginning of this talk,
we have to temper some of this optimism
with a healthy dose of caution,
and that’s largely because
the data are still being determined.
At the end of last year,
after roughly three years
of pretty steady global carbon emissions,
scientific projections suggest
that global emissions
may be on the rise again
and that could be due to increases
in China’s fossil fuel consumptions,
so they may not have reached
that peak that I showed earlier.
But of course, the statistics
and the data are still murky
and that’s because China regularly revises
its coal statistics after the fact.
Actually, it’s funny,
since I’ve been here I’ve been
having a debate on Twitter
with other climate modelers,
trying to figure out
whether China’s carbon emissions
have gone up, gone down or whether
they’re staying relatively stable.
And of course, China is still
a rapidly developing country.
It’s still experimenting
with a range of policies,
like dockless bike sharing,
which has been hailed as a possible
sustainable transport solution.
But then we have images
of this bicycle graveyard
that tell a more cautionary tale.
Sometimes, solutions can move too fast
and outpace demand.
And of course,
coal is still king in China,
at least for now.
So why should we care about
what China is doing on the environment?
Well, what China does at home
on the environment
can have global implications
for the rest of us.
To borrow a line from Chai Jing,
we’re all under the same dome,
and air pollution that originates in China
can travel beyond its borders
and affect populations
as far away as those in North America.
China’s not only exporting air pollution,
but they’re also exporting aid,
infrastructure, technology abroad.
President Xi Jinping in 2013 announced
the One Belt, One Road Initiative,
a massive, one-trillion-US-dollar
infrastructure investment project
in more than 60 other countries.
And historically, when we’ve seen
that China has made
these infrastructure investments abroad,
they haven’t always been clean.
The Global Environment Institute,
a Chinese civil society group,
found that in the last 15 years,
China has invested in more
than 240 coal-fired power plants
in more than 68 countries
affiliated with the One Belt,
One Road Initiative.
That’s more than a quarter of China’s
own domestic coal-fired capacity
that is exported abroad.
So we can see that even though
China is cleaning up at home,
it’s exporting some of that pollution
to other countries,
and greenhouse gas emissions
simply don’t have a passport.
So when we’re trying
to evaluate this question
of whether or not China
is actually leading,
we can see it’s still
very much an open debate.
But time is running out.
I’ve studied the climate models,
and the outlook is not good.
We still have a gap
between current policies
and what needs to happen if we want
to avoid dangerous climate change.
Leadership is what we desperately need,
but it’s not coming
from the US, for example.
The US administration last June
announced its intent
to withdraw from
the Paris Climate Agreement,
so now people are looking towards China
to fill that leadership void.
So China is very much in the driver’s seat
determining our global
environmental future.
What they do on carbon trading,
on clean energy, on air pollution,
we can learn many lessons.
One of those lessons is that clean energy
is not just good for the environment,
it can save lives
by reducing air pollution.
It’s also good for the economy.
We can see that last year,
China was responsible
for 30 percent of the global growth
in green jobs.
The US? Only six.
So the picture that I just painted for you
hopefully seems much different
from those murky,
foggy air quality statistics
to a much clearer picture
of China’s clean energy.
And even though China
is headed in the right direction,
we know that there’s still
a very long road ahead.
So let me ask you once more:
Is seeing believing?
Can we trust the data and the statistics
that show that China’s
air quality is coming down
and that its war on coal
is actually having an effect?
Well, let’s take a look
at some of the latest satellite images
of China’s solar power installations.
I want you to look
very closely at this image.
Can you see?
The proof may just be in the pandas.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)